The Art of Souls

The longest and most distinctive part of the Pastoral Rule is its third book, in which Gregory sets out, case by case, how the one and unchanging teaching of the Church must be adapted to the endless variety of those who hear it. The same exhortation, he insists, does not suit all, “for the same medicine is not for all, since the very fever is not the same in all.” He draws up a long series of contrasted pairs — men and women, the poor and the rich, the joyful and the sad, the meek and the choleric, the humble and the proud, the healthy and the sick — and shows how each must be admonished differently, lest the word that heals one wound another. This cura animarum, the care of souls as a work of discernment, is the heart of Gregory’s pastoral genius and is recognizably kin to the Eastern tradition of spiritual fatherhood.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Pope of Rome; Great Hierarch)

The One Teaching and the Many Souls

The governing principle of Part III of the Pastoral Rule is stated at the outset: “Diverse therefore are the dispositions of hearers, and so the discourse of the teacher should be fashioned according to the character of the hearers, so as to suit each for his own needs and yet never shrink from the art of common edification” (Gregory, Pastoral Rule 3, prologue; trans. Davis 1950). The truth preached is one and unchanging; but souls are not one, and the same words strike different souls differently. Gregory presses the analogy of the physician throughout: just as the doctor must vary his remedy to the patient and the disease — what cures one sickness aggravates another — so the preacher must vary his exhortation to the soul before him (Gregory, Pastoral Rule 3, prologue; Straw 1988, 190–235).

This is why pastoral care is, for Gregory, an art and not a formula. The pastor must first discern the soul — its disposition, its hidden vices, the temptations to which it is prone — and only then apply the appropriate word. To preach the same thing to all, indiscriminately, is not faithfulness but malpractice; it is to give the same medicine for every fever.

The Catalogue of Contraries

Gregory works this out in a famous catalogue of contrasted types — by the traditional count, thirty-six pairs of opposites, each requiring its own kind of admonition (Gregory, Pastoral Rule 3.1–40; Davis 1950). A few of the pairs convey the method:

The poor and the rich: the poor are to be consoled lest poverty crush them into despair or envy; the rich are to be alarmed lest abundance make them proud and forgetful of God. The same word of comfort that lifts the poor would only flatter the rich (Pastoral Rule 3.2).
The joyful and the sad: the joyful are to be shown the sorrow of judgment that follows ill-ordered mirth; the sad are to be shown the joys of the kingdom promised them. To preach gladness to the frivolous or severity to the broken is to mistake the medicine (Pastoral Rule 3.3).
The meek and the choleric (the patient and the angry): the meek must be warned lest their gentleness slide into sloth and indifference; the angry must be warned lest their zeal turn to cruelty. Each virtue has a neighbouring vice into which it tips (Pastoral Rule 3.16).
The humble and the proud: the humble are to be encouraged to a holy confidence; the proud are to be humbled — but even the warning to the proud must be tempered, lest it crush rather than correct (Pastoral Rule 3.17).

The catalogue runs through dozens of such pairs — the impatient and the patient, the kindly and the envious, the simple and the insincere, the well and the sick, those who fear scourges and those whom scourges only harden, the silent and the talkative, the slothful and the hasty, the gentle and the passionate, those bound in wedlock and those who are free, those who have sinned and grieve and those who sin and do not grieve. In every case the lesson is the same: the truth must be so applied that it reaches this soul, in its condition, without harming what is sound in it (Gregory, Pastoral Rule 3.1–40; Straw 1988, 190–235).

Discernment, Not Compromise

It is essential to see that Gregory’s accommodation is not a softening or a compromise of the truth. The truth preached to all is identical; what varies is the manner and emphasis of its application, so that the same medicine may actually heal rather than harm. Gregory is acutely aware of the danger of correcting one fault and provoking another — of so rebuking the proud that they despair, or so consoling the weak that they grow careless — and the whole art consists in giving each soul exactly what it needs and no more. He even warns the preacher that sometimes lesser faults must be borne with for a time, lest in tearing them out too violently the greater good be lost (Gregory, Pastoral Rule 3.40; Straw 1988, 190–235). This is the same gradualism — “steps, not leaps” — that governed his instruction to the English mission (see The Responsa and Method).

Kinship with the Eastern Spiritual Fatherhood

For an Orthodox reader the cura animarum of the Pastoral Rule is immediately familiar, for it is in substance the same art that the Eastern tradition calls the work of the spiritual father (pneumatikos patēr, the geron or starets). The discernment of souls (diakrisis), the adaptation of the counsel to the particular person, the treatment of sin as a sickness and the confessor as a physician, the refusal to apply one rule mechanically to all — these are the very marks of Orthodox spiritual direction as it descends from the desert fathers through the Ladder of St. John Climacus and the whole ascetic tradition. Gregory, formed in the same patristic inheritance and steeped in the monastic literature, arrives at the same pastoral wisdom and gives it classic Latin expression. His Rule is thus a meeting-place of East and West: a Western book that the East can read as its own, because the cure of souls it teaches is the common patrimony of the undivided Church (Straw 1988, 190–235; on the patristic pastoral tradition, see The Church Fathers).

It is fitting, then, that this most Eastern of Gregory’s books should have been the one the Greek Church received in translation in his own lifetime (see The Regula Pastoralis). The art of souls knows no language-frontier; and in the Pastoral Rule a Roman pope set down, for both halves of Christendom, what it means to heal a human heart.

References

Gregory the Great. Pastoral Care (Regula Pastoralis), Part 3 (prologue and chapters 1–40). Trans. Henry Davis. Ancient Christian Writers 11. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1950. (The “same medicine is not for all” principle; the catalogue of contrasted hearers; the toleration of lesser faults at 3.40.) Also NPNF II/12.
Straw, Carole. Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, 190–235. (The cura animarum, discernment, and pastoral adaptation.)
Markus, R. A. Gregory the Great and His World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 17–34. (The Pastoral Rule in context.)